LILAC conference 2010

16 Mar LILAC conference 2010

Exciting news – I’m going to the Librarian’s Information Literacy Annual Conference (LILAC) 2010! I’ve always really wanted to go – providing information literacy support is one of my favourite parts of being an academic librarian. A colleague attended LILAC last year and said it was fantastic, so I applied for the sponsored student award this year and am absolutely over the moon to have been successful. 🙂

This year it’s being held in Limerick, Ireland – I’ve never been to Ireland so I’m really looking forward to it (shockingly, I’ve never actually used a Euro either as I haven’t been anywhere in Europe since the currency change!). It’s been a bit tricky trying to organise travel and accommodation within budget and at relatively short notice, but I’ve now booked my flight (another first – never flown on my own before!) and my hotel, and they’re even able to offer me a gluten free breakfast!

There are loads of really good parallel sessions and it was difficult to choose which to attend. Some were already fully booked when I took a look at them, but I’ve now managed to book my sessions and have an exc’iting looking programme! I’m going to the newcomer’s lunch to get conference advice and meet other newcomers, and will hopefully also get the opportunity to meet committee members, organisers, and the keynote speakers – as well as fellow librarians and information professionals from UK and abroad.

I’m particularly looking forward to meeting other tweeters I’ve had conversations with but not yet met face to face, including @katie_fraser who won last year’s sponsored student place and will hopefully have some conference tips! I’ve been creating a public Twitter list of LILAC 2010 delegates from those I have found who have been using the hashtag #lilac2010 and others who I know are attending, if you are a tweeter attending LILAC this year and would like to be added to the public list, please let me know by either leaving a blog comment here, emailing me, or contacting me on Twitter. A suggestion was made by @jwebbery about maybe arranging a tweet up too, which I think would be great – please let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions of how to organise this, or where/when might be suitable.

Cheeky! It’s not the dissertation that’s taking a long time – it just took me 18 months to settle into my new job and choose a dissertation topic. Now I’ve got my research confirmed it’s progressing a lot faster thankfully!